What is Shared Hosting?

Shared Hosting is usually what people refer to when they say "web hosting" or "hosting".This type of hosting is what most people use and fine for sites that don't get a lot of visitors. It is called shared hosting because usually there are hundreds of customers per server so they are sharing the server.

Because you are sharing the server with a lot of other people this lowers the cost but can also lead to instability. For instance if the server has a lot of people and one person starts getting a lot of traffic on their forum it can cause the server to crash every site on the server. A good host will be able to keep the server up usually but no host can do this perfectly unless they raise prices.